Yes, Dad, I attended third grade.
Anyway, so this is how it worked. We rode a bus from Paris to London. To get to the UK from France, you have to ride on this underground/underwater train called the "Channel Tunnel" or "Chunnel" for short. You can read a little more about it here. Our driver boarded the bus onto a train and then we rode over to the UK. If I closed my eyes I could almost forget about the thousands of pounds of water waiting to crush me.
In London, I had a hellish time trying to get a ticket reserved to Dublin. Ty and I bought a fifteen day pass from Eurolines, so we could take the bus at any time within the fifteen days, and this was the last part of our pass. I went to reserve the ticket and the woman told me it would cost six pounds to reserve it. For one, I was upset because the fifteen day pass wasn't cheap, and it was dumb that they made us pay to reserve tickets. For two, I only had euros, which, of course, they wouldn't accept. So, I ran back to where Ty was sitting with all of our bags and got my debit card. Which, of course, didn't work. The woman reminded me she couldn't reserve our seats unless I paid to reserve them. The next bus wouldn't leave until the morning and I didn't have a hotel booked so I was really worried. Because I didn't know if I had time to go back to Ty to get a different card to try, I ran to a money exchange, and got extorted exchanging Czech crowns to British pounds. Anyway, I finally had enough money to reserve the tickets. Ty and I ate supper and waited to get on the bus.
In movies, they make British and Irish accents sound cute. In real life, it's like they're speaking another language. Not only was our bus driver incredibly rude to us, we also couldn't understand half of what he was saying. He started off the trip by refusing to let Ty take his backpack onto the bus because it was too big, even though I had just gotten onto the bus with a backpack the same size. Then, we had to stop for an hour on the road so he could eat his supper. He told us to get off the bus and then be back on at 9:15. At 9:05 he shouted at us "hey hey hey!" waved his hand and expected us to follow him onto the bus. Then made fun of us to other passengers as we got on the bus for being "late."
If the bus driver did one more thing rude to us, I was going to tell him this:
We had to go through customs twice: once at ten o'clock at night, and once at 2 o'clock in the morning. This included us getting off of the bus with all of our bags, letting someone look at them, showing the customs officials our passport, and then getting back on the bus. Soon, we were on the last leg of our trip. The driver drove the bus onto a ferry at about 2:30 AM. We had to get off the bus and go up to a lounge area, that I would have appreciated a lot more had it not been cold and 2:30 in the morning. (Did I mention we lost our coats in Rome and it was freezing cold all night?) I ended up using one of my long skirts as a blanket... that's some red neck engineering right there!
After about three and a half hours our ferry arrived in Dublin and we got back on the bus. By this time we had been on the bus from 8:00 AM (in Paris) to 6:00 AM the next day. I think next time... we'll probably just fly. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment